Posted on 09/28/2003 9:45:14 AM PDT by Stew Padasso
Dream, reality collide in violent clash
N.C. man's idealism dies in shooting that left him scarred for life
ALLEN G. BREED Associated Press
CHAPEL HILL - When Brian Avery called home in early January to say he was heading for Israel, his parents realized they could not stop him. But he was still their youngest child, and they had to at least try.
His father, Bob Avery, tried to reason with his 24-year-old son: "This issue has been there for so long. How do you think you can change it?"
"If everyone took the position that `There's nothing I can do,' " Brian replied, "then nothing's ever going to change."
Brian knew that peace activists had been wounded in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and that a humanitarian worker had been killed the year before. But that had supposedly been accidental, a fluke.
"I'm not going to be a fighter," Brian assured his father. "I'm going to report on the events and write articles."
His mother's voice came over the phone: "Sort of like a journalist?"
"Yup," he replied. "Sort of like that."
The words "human shield" didn't come up until later.
The ponytailed rock drummer studied music in college, but dropped out after a year to work on an organic farm. He traveled to Chicago and joined the Stone Soup Cooperative, a social justice group, where he worked with the homeless and the poor.
While studying herbal medicine in Albuquerque last winter, Brian had become involved with the local Arab-Jewish Peace Alliance. He decided to volunteer with a group called the International Solidarity Movement.
What the International Solidarity Movement stands for depends on whom you ask.
Founded in 2001, the ISM operates in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, lands Israel seized in the 1967 war. Some Israelis see those lands as a necessary buffer against continuing sniper attacks and suicide bombings. Jewish settlers claim them as a scriptural birthright.
For Palestinians, however, the Israeli presence there is a heavy-handed occupation in their homeland.
The latest Palestinian uprising began three years ago. Since then, 2,477 Palestinians and 860 Israelis have died in the fighting.
ISM's founders saw themselves as an international peacekeeping and monitoring presence.
The activists, mainly from the United States and Great Britain, act as "human shields" at checkpoints or when Israeli troops move in to retaliate for a suicide attack by bulldozing a bomber's house.
The Israeli government sees ISM differently: as meddlers whose actions range from negligence to abetting terrorism.
Brian had been in the West Bank city of Nablus less than a week when his parents got a long e-mail.
His group's main actions, he wrote Jan. 31, consisted of "being monitors and witnesses at military checkpoints" and "lodging in the homes of the families of individuals who chose suicide bombing as their method of resisting the occupation."
The e-mail turned his parents inside-out again. They had pictured him handing out food and medicine or sharing his knowledge of organic farming.
Brian told them his American citizenship put him in a special position. On the one hand, it made him feel partly responsible for what was happening because of U.S. aid to Israel.
At the same time, he saw his American passport as a "badge of invincibility" that he would share with the Palestinians.
Six weeks later, on March 16, ISM member Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old college student from Olympia, Wash., was crushed to death while trying to stop an Israeli bulldozer demolishing a row of Palestinian homes in the Gaza Strip town of Rafah. Israeli officials said she was in a blind spot and the driver couldn't see her, despite her bright red vest.
"Please get out of Palestine while you can!!!!" Julie Avery begged her son in an e-mail.
But Brian had trained with Rachel Corrie, and her death made him more determined.
Still, he tried to reassure his parents: He was headed north to Jenin, even farther from the volatile Gaza Strip.
"Don't worry, Mom," he said in a rare telephone call. "They don't shoot Americans."
Bob Avery was sitting in his basement office April 5 when the phone rang.
"I'm afraid I've got some very, very bad news for you," a voice said in heavily accented English.
It was Tobias Karlsson, head of ISM's Jenin office. Minutes before, he and Brian had heard gunfire in the streets below. The city was under curfew, but the two went out to meet four other activists and investigate.
They noticed two Israeli vehicles -- an armored personnel carrier and what appeared to be a tank -- rumbling behind them.
Slowly, they backed up under a street lamp and put their arms out at their sides to let the vehicles pass, Karlsson said. Brian was wearing a reflective vest, identifying him as a peace activist.
Suddenly, they were being pelted by bits of shattered pavement. The Israelis would often fire two or three warning shots at a wall, Karlsson explained, but this time 10, 15, 20 rounds were fired.
When the shooting stopped, he turned to find Brian lying on his stomach, blood seeping from his face between his fingers.
Three days later, Bob Avery arrived at Haifa's Rambam Medical Center.
Brian's face was twice its normal size, its hue a yellowish-purple from massive bruising. The suturing pattern on his left cheek, where the bullet had exited, looked like a ragged spider web. Avery gingerly embraced his son.
The bullet had entered just below Brian's right tear duct. There was a large hole where Brian's nasal bone should have been. Half of the teeth were missing on the top left side, and another on the bottom. The floor of his left eye socket was gone. His lower left jaw had been sheared in half.
"He'll never go back together," Bob Avery said to himself. When he got back to his hotel room that night, he wept.
April 10 was Brian's 25th birthday. The hospital staff sang to him. Members of Amnesty International brought a chocolate mousse cake. And a surgeon laid out a plan to harvest bone from the sides of Brian's skull to rebuild the nasal area.
The Israel Defense Force released its findings on his shooting in late May.
The armored personnel carrier crew had reported firing on three occasions that day, including eight to 10 warning shots toward three or four "suspicious figures" who had approached them. No casualties were identified.
The "presence of innocent civilians" on the streets during curfew was rare, the report noted.
The soldiers in Jenin saw ISM as anything but innocent.
Just eight days before the shooting, Israeli forces had raided the office and arrested an Islamic Jihad leader suspected of planning suicide attacks. (ISM says the man ran into the office during a foot chase.)
The report's conclusion: "Mr. Avery's injury is an unfortunate incident."
Bob Avery was outraged. Interviewing the five ISM witnesses who saw Brian shot and others, he found what he considered a key discovery:
ISM had said Brian's injury occurred at 6:30 p.m., a time when the army showed the armored personnel carrier was several blocks away. Actually, it was an hour later. Israel had just begun observing the equivalent of daylight saving time, but clocks in the Palestinian sector were still set an hour earlier.
That put the APC in the shooting area around the right time, Avery concluded.
The defense force paid for Brian's treatment in Haifa. But when he left the hospital, he was on his own.
By the time Brian returned to the United States on June 14, 21/2 months on a liquid diet had shrunk the former defensive lineman to 115 pounds.
When he talks now, he says, the sound echoes inside his skull. He cannot breathe through his nose and has no sense of smell.
He faces at least five more surgeries in the coming year. Doctors say they can erase much of the scarring, and he has recovered enough sight to drive.
He has no insurance. He and his parents have met with several congressional staffs in an effort to pressure the Israeli government to take responsibility, to no avail.
He regrets that his medical needs have thrown his parents' retirement into financial chaos. He regrets he may never again smell a rose or smile as before.
But he insists he does not regret his decision to go.
He wants to return to the region someday. Only next time, he'll go as a true observer. He has no more illusions of invincibility.
That's a pre-existing condition.
Rocket scientists . . .
Why not?
Mine is camo and made of kevlar.....DUMBASS!!!
The "presence of innocent civilians" on the streets during curfew was rare
....hhmmmmmm
His group's main actions, he wrote Jan. 31, consisted of "being monitors and witnesses at military checkpoints" and "lodging in the homes of the families of individuals who chose suicide bombing as their method of resisting the occupation."
Homicidal bombing is what I call it. How does blowing up innocent women and children equate to resistance? It's a terrorist act: inhumane, barbaric, and criminal. Avery's parents are supportive of this?
While studying herbal medicine in Albuquerque last winter, Brian had become involved with the local Arab-Jewish Peace Alliance. He decided to volunteer with a group called the International Solidarity Movement.
About sums it up. Seems to be a simple case of altruism.
FMCDH
Yes, isn't that strange? I'll bet Brian never went to visit Israeli homicide bomb victims in the hospitals. Some of them look worse than he does, and have far worse other injuries. The Israelis have to patrol, because otherwise the Palestinians would be murdering far more of them. But all that escaped Brian, even he was a peace activist, staying in homes that had raised their children to be anything but peaceful.
That's a pre-existing condition.
"...there's someone in my head, but it's not me..."
FMCDH
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